Topic : Online

A news story that flitted across the headlines earlier this year reported on a study called "The Geography of Happiness," in which researchers in Vermont subjected 10 million geotagged tweets to sentiment analysis. Their object was to arrive at a metric for the relative happiness of people in a place. "The Geography of Happiness" breaks new ground in the analysis of digital-age linguistic data, while also raising interesting questions about the limits of obtaining reliable results from algorithm-driven research on big bags of words.
Continue reading...

Article Topics:

In the latest quarterly update to the Oxford English Dictionary, one entry in particular has attracted attention: tweet, previously defined only as the chirping of birds, has been expanded to refer to 140-character Twitter updates as well. The OED loosened its usual "ten year rule" to let this newcomer in.
Continue reading...

Article Topics:

About Those Dialect Maps...

June 7, 2013

You might have seen a set of American English dialect maps making the rounds online after a Business Insider piece about the maps went viral. But where does all of that survey data come from? Our own Ben Zimmer has the story on Language Log — read his post here.

Article Topics:

The hashtag, which was born on Twitter as a handy way to organize conversation, is now spreading to Facebook. But there's a #hashtag #backlash, too, with some wondering if the convention has outlived its usefulness.
Continue reading...

Article Topics:

Find the Literature You Need... Online

February 12, 2013

Looking for texts accessible online? These e-text sites contain thousands of unbound texts. Anne of Green Gables, The Blue Fairy Book, Animal Farm, all of Mark Twain's writing? It's on there. Bonus: you can grab the vocabulary from any of these texts using VocabGrabber.